Hilton College an Independent Boy's Boarding School

At the end of a road eight kilometres from the Village of Hilton, on an Escarpment above Pietermaritzburg, are large wrought-iron gates! Behind these is: 'Hilton College'.

Hilton College is an independent boarding school for boys near Hilton in the KwaZulu-Natal Midlands. Situated on a 1762 hectare estate, Hilton caters for 555 boys from Grade 8 to Grade 12.
The College faces Northwards across the wide sweep of the Umgeni Valley with the Karkloof Hills on the horizon.

 When F.B. Malim, Master of Wellington College in England, conducted an inspection tour of the independent schools of Canada, Australia, New Zealand and South Africa in 1938, he reported that: "There can hardly be a nobler site in the Empire for a country school … with its wide prospect of green hills, its seclusion from crowds, its vast and storm-swept sky". And when decades later a Hilton head boy was showing another overseas visitor around the white Cape-Dutch-style buildings, Romanesque stone chapel and tree-skirted sports facilities, admiringly the American had likened it to an Ivy League university. But it has taken nearly 150 years for a rustic colonial schoolhouse to evolve into the singular South African school of today!

Hilton’s founders in 1872 were: 'Gould Lucas, a magistrate and Reverend William Newnham, a teacher and cleric'. Lucas was Anglo-Irish, the son of an Under Secretary for Ireland, and in 1852 had been a young officer on HMS Birkenhead, among the Royal Navy’s first iron fighting ships, transporting troops to the Cape’s Eastern Frontier when it struck rocks off Danger Point near Cape Agulhas and sank. Being among the few soldier survivors, he was later posted to Pietermaritzburg where he served as military official and met the man with whom decades later, he would found Hilton College. Newnham was English, the son of a surgeon, and had studied mathematics at St John’s College, Cambridge under William John Colenso, later Bishop of Natal, and been encouraged by Colenso to settle in the Colony of Natalia and start a school.

Not long afterwards, Lucas was sent to India, but not before he had noted the beautiful countryside North of the Colony’s Capital. On returning to Natal, he took up the post of Magistrate in Ladysmith, where he assisted Newnham in founding a school, but soon relocated it to the tract of mist-belt grassland above Pietermaritzburg that earlier he had purchased. So, Hilton College was born!

The land was part of 'Ongegund'- a farm belonging to a Johanna Grobbelaar, which had been purchased by her late husband from the original Voortrekker grantee. Because an adjoining portion, bought by Natal Bank Chairman: 'Joseph Henderson', had been named ‘Hilton’, Lucas called his estate ‘Upper Hilton’. The name may have derived from ‘Hill Town’, being ‘Town Hill’ reversed, or from a place in England significant to the Hendersons.

At first the school was little more than two thatched bungalows, but soon a double-storey block was built, with the upper-storey dubbed ‘The Lords’ and the lower, ‘The Commons’. From this modest nucleus Hilton grew, with buildings being constructed, playing fields levelled and avenues planted. Initially the school was leased from Lucas; then bought by Newnham’s successor Ellis, until in 1903 it passed into the hands of the old boys, where it remains. In another distinguishing feature, Hilton has always been inter-denominational, with the headmaster conducting daily prayers and visiting priests officiating on Sundays until a Resident Chaplain was appointed in 1982.

Standing in stark contrast to the white buildings is the chapel, built in the 1920's from stone quarried on the property. And prominent in the complex are the Campbell Block, Crookes Block and Saunders Sanatorium, each donated by a family which had prospered from sugar, Natal’s premier crop. As all the boys are boarders, seven separate boarding houses are today arranged along the school’s circular drive."People may know about our 150-hectare Hilton College campus, but few know about the wider 1,600-hectare school property, 650 hectares of which is a proclaimed nature reserve bordered by the Umgeni River, and home to: 'warthog, giraffe, zebra, wildebeest and six species of buck."